Sleep Info

Learn to Sleep Better

The three cornerstones to a healthy life are diet, exercise and sleep. Sleep is the easiest to fix! Read about the latest sleep research and get advice to help you learn how to get the best night’s rest possible. Check out the links to the left for the latest in sleep research and tips on how to sleep better.

What's Your Zzzz Score

Our goal is to help you learn how to sleep better with sleep tips, advice, articles, and other resources. Take our all-new Zzzz Score, an 8-question survey that assesses your sleep habits and provides personalized tips and information on how to get a better night’s sleep.

Recommended Products

Carpenter Co., the creator of SleepBetter, is the largest manufacturer of comfort cushioning in the world. Since 1948, our focus has been on quality, technology and comfort. We manufacture a wide variety of products, all designed to help you get a great night’s sleep.

Sleeping Without Disturbance Helps Your Memory

New research points out just how important sleep is when it comes to memory, while at the same time showing us that we need quiet and uninterrupted sleep.

The research, conducted by scientists at several New York City institutions, looked at what happens when new information is introduced while a subject is sleeping. During sleep, the brain performs a number of important repair and maintenance duties that are necessary for normal functioning, including moving information from short-term to long-term memory. Previous studies show that the “replay” of recently learned information during sleep plays an important role in memory storage. However, it was unknown what happens when new information was introduced during slow-wave sleep (SWS), the phase of deep sleep during which the brain’s sensory systems are far less responsive to external stimuli.

In the study, rats were introduced to a new smell before sleeping and while they were in slow-wave sleep. Some received different smells, while others received the same smells. To precisely control the animals’ odor experience during periods of wakefulness and sleep, the researchers delivered electrical stimulation to brain circuits involved in odor processing rather than relying on the delivery of real odors to the animals.

When the memory of a specific odor learned when the rats were awake was replayed during slow-wave sleep, they achieved a stronger memory for that odor the next day, compared to rats that received no replay, or only received replay when they were awake. However, when the research team exposed the rats to replay during sleep of an odor pattern that they had not previously learned, the rats had false memories to many different odors.

In short, the research shows that uninterrupted sleep helps reinforce and categorize memories in your brain, but when that sleep is interrupted with new information, it can cause not only that new information but other information to be mis-categorized.

About Us

Created by Carpenter Co., SleepBetter is here to help with one of the biggest problems facing individuals today: lack of sleep. Diet, exercise and sleep are the cornerstones of good health, and sleep is the easiest to fix. Let us help you! We provide sleep tips and advice through our hundreds of articles, and foster discussion on SleepBetter.org, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Using these tools, we hope to give others the information they need to make a choice to sleep better. If you have a question about sleep, just ask and we’ll try to help with an answer as part of our Ask SleepBetter feature.